Lecture notes for April 16, 2008

The question of utility in literature is often raised: even Bettelheim called his book The
Uses of Enchantment. A basic presumption that reading or listening to stories does something
to us; trying to figure out what it does (especially to malleable children) so often moves into
wanting it to do something we approve of, imposing control or censorship.

Maria Tatar, “Fact and Fantasy: The Art of Reading Fairy Tales” – this is a sort of
hard-nosed approach, moving away from consideration of the enchantment factor. – Refer to
Jessica’s presentation online.

Various ways “Little Red Riding Hood” or other tales have been interpreted/mined for the
point of view its readers thought most appropriate even before they read it! Literal readings;
symbolic readings. The correctives to interpretation that are offered by broad comparative study
of folktales (as with the Aarne/Thompson tale-type index). Tatar outlines the concerns a student
of folk tales must have in order to study or do scholarship responsibly – what caught your
attention?

She quotes the very quotable W. H. Auden (p. 56): “No fairy story ever claimed to be a
description of the external world and no sane child ever believed that it was.”

Jack Zipes, “Who’s Afraid of the Brothers Grimm? Socialization and Politicization through
Fairy Tales.” (There’s simply a lot more scholarship in English about the Grimms than about
Afanas'ev – and the Grimms' versions are likely to lie at the source of our own pop-culture
treatments of fairy tales.) Can you tell that Zipes takes a Marxist approach? (Chernyshevskij
question: what are the motives of a scholar or philosopher, what’s in the argument for them?)

Opens with the possibility (p. 45) that “the Grimms’ stories contribute to the creation of a
false consciousness and reinforce an authoritarian socialization process.” Walks us through
examples from the various editions of Grimm. The effects of spreading literacy on a society that
was experiencing growing prominence of the bourgeois. But also the potential for fairy-tales to
challenge the accepted shape of society (p. 55): “In some respects reading can function
explosively like a dream and serve to challenge socialization and constraints.” Zipes doesn't
note here, but you might, that Marxism largely spread through reading.

Concentrating in part II on how a fairy tale educates or rather socializes a child. Like
Tatar, he mentions “The Table, the Ass and the Stick.” And: examples of “reutilized” fairy
tales by West German authors (- a term that dates his study to pre-1991! – he mentions that
it’s 1982 as he writes). How do the examples compare to Politically Correct tales you’ve read
or heard?

Frank J. Miller’s Folklore for Stalin: any observations, questions?

Where socialist realism overlaps with kid lit: Puritanism (19th century/Victorian or
Biedermeier), pedagogical bent, and other kinds of censorship; Positive Examples. (Do you know
what socialist realism is?) How you’re supposed to think and act, underlined by the presumed
“naturalness” and also “nationalness” of folklore.

The first part I asked you to read reflects the Soviet situation (the book was published in
1990, and the USSR fell apart in 1991) – from the 1920’s, when there was still considerable
freedom (and honesty)!) through the general repression on artistic etc. expression of the 1930s.
Frank Miller’s somewhat scornful comments about how the folklorists really considered the new
fake stuff real folklore seem not to take into account that people in ALL kinds of fields were
pretending that things were just great under Stalin - why should the folklorists be more honest
or outspoken (or inviting of death and retribution) than the others!? (Cite a colleague’s
comments on the little notebooks she collected from her students, who often practiced fieldwork
with members of their families or neighbors: under Stalin they’d have impounded both the
notebooks and the folklorist! – and how student notes were used to de-kulakize villages in the
very same Russian North where so many of the most respected fakelore artists came from.) But
other than that – the "fakelore" shows both homogenization and editorial interference, as well
as insistence on composition on order (to celebrate some new achievement of the Great Leader, or
to mourn the death of one of his trusted lieutenants). The interference of growing literacy (as
Ong said: who wouldn’t want to be literate! – but you do lose some things as well). And: because
it wasn’t a controlled experiment, you can’t say how much this interference and
folklore-on-purpose killed off any remaining real stuff in those genres. Many of them were dying
out by the Revolution anyway – accordions were replacing gusly, and chastushki stepping in for
many kinds of folk songs, town dances for the old folk ones).

The chapter “The Fate of Pseudofolklore” shows just what you’d expect! After 1953, the
noviny were attacked instantly as “stillborn” – in other words, neither viable nor able
to generate further progeny. But even now: folklore generally means old stuff, perhaps preserved
in memory (the last few village babushki with memories from before 1930) – for collection and
study of recent materials Russians will more often say ethnography than folklore. Genres such as
pornographic or political jokes were considered incorrect, and only published (and only a bit!)
under glasnost’. And, as before, folklorists continue to help folk performers; people working in
the living history museums wind up collecting songs and performing them, etc.

In general: where does folklore move into ethnography, or popular culture? (Where would you
put Disney?) What is the status of a “literary reworking” – whether by someone ostensibly from
the folk, or by someone like Marina Tsvetaeva? And: why would they have invested SO much time
in creating/collecting/publishing/republishing all this pseudo-folklore?